Learning Emacs will reward me with knowledge of a powerful cross-platform and general-purpose tool. I plan to learn Emacs by following Avdi Grimm’s example in his “Emacs Reboot” series. Namely, to set-up Emacs 24 from scratch as a learning exercise.
For each of the following, study the changes made and incorporate those that seem most relevant and useful.
- Emacs Reboot
- Emacs Prelude
- Emacs24 Starter Kit
- Xah Lee’s Emacs Tutorial and his Ergoemacs
- Kurt Schwehr’s Research Tools
Keep all emacs configuation in a single directory. Put that directory under version control, and push it to Github.
Emacs Reboot #1: Beginnings, Part 1
Check out Emacs 24 from bzr and build it from source.
- DECLINED I use a PPA for Emacs 24 from Batsov’s Emacs Prelude.
Emacs Reboot #1: Beginnings, Part 2
- ACCEPTED I installed the various development libraries needed to build Emacs 24.
sudo apt-get install libgtk-3-dev libgif-dev libxpm-dev
Test the emacs newly built from source, and force it to load a different init file
- DECLINED I installed Emacs 24 from a package manager.
sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk3-dev
Set .emacs to switch between Emacs 23 and Emacs 24 depending on which version of Emacs one starts.
- DECLINED I don’t plan to keep multiple versions of emacs installed.
Combine all configuration in a single version-controlled directory and push that to Github.
- ACCEPTED See JayDugger/.emacs.d on GitHub.
Set emacs to use ~/.emacs24.d/emacs-customizations.el.
- DECLINED I don’t plan to keep multiple versions of emacs installed.
Move back-up file copies from their default location alongside the original file to a single central directory at ~/.emacs.d/backups.
- DECLINED Creating a central back-up directory doesn’t offer my any advantages.
I use the Maramalade package archive to install the latest and greatest Magit-mode for managing Git repositories.
- ACCEPTED
- Emacs Reboot series from Avdi Grimm’s blog Virtuous Code
- Bozhidar Batsov’s Emacs Prelude
- Eric Shulte’s Emacs24 Starter Kit
- Xah Lee’s Emacs Tutorial and his Ergoemacs
- Kurt Schwehr’s 2011 Research Tools class